Technical Field
The present disclosure relates generally to the technical field of flow cytometry and, more particularly, to the structure and operation of an improved flow cytometer together with various individual subassemblies included therein.
Background
Flow cytometry is a biophysical technique employed in cell counting, sorting, biomarker detection and protein engineering. In flow cytometry, cells suspended in a stream of liquid pass through an electronic detection apparatus. Flow cytometry allows simultaneous multiparametric analysis of physical and/or chemical characteristics of up to thousands of cells per second.
Flow cytometry has various applications including in the fields of molecular biology, pathology, immunology, plant biology and marine biology. Flow cytometry also has broad application in medicine (especially in transplantation, hematology, tumor immunology and chemotherapy, prenatal diagnosis, genetics and sperm sorting for sex preselection). In marine biology, the autofluorescent properties of photosynthetic plankton can be exploited by flow cytometry in characterizing abundance and community composition. In protein engineering, flow cytometry is used in conjunction with yeast display and bacterial display to identify cell surface-displayed protein variants with desired properties. A common variation of flow cytometry is physically sorting particles based on their properties thereby purifying a population of interest.